Beauty, Mercy, Justice

Three

One of the great things about having a lot of children is that there is often a three year old in the house. I don’t know if I have a favorite age, unless it is “under six”, but three year olds are particularly delightful. While articulate and imaginative, they retain something of infancy, unselfconscious and without guile.

Our current three year old, Michael Seraphim, is bright and funny and mischievous. He has come a long way from his babyhood, when he was known as “Fussy Fussmore” and “The Horrible Adorable Baby”. Of course he was also cute and sweet- that was the “adorable” part of the equation- but he was also our most ornery baby. He nearly always, for the first two years of his life, woke up crying, if not screaming.

Can you imagine living like that?

Our new baby, Daniel, is blessedly the happiest yet, much to our relief.

Michael started mellowing some when he was two, and while he is still a handful he is also a lot of fun. I will resist regaling you with Michael stories, but allow me to share a couple examples of his cuteness and creativity.

First, his cuteness. Suffice it to say that he calls R2D2, the robot from Star Wars, “R-Tooty-Too”.

And his creativity: I have always used my hands as primitive puppets to talk to young children, and have never found one who could resist a conversation. Michael gives them names, and they sort of assume the personality of his highly evocative names. The characters, so far, are: Myron Jones, Quicky the Snake, Tricky D’Mosso, Joonzy Furtail (a squirrel), and the latest member of the cast, Joey Beans. I assume you know just by looking which of these are the good guys and which are the bad guys, except for Joey Beans. I could see someone named “Joey Beans” as a thick tough guy, like a mob enforcer. But I could also see him as a gee-whiz, freckle-faced cub reporter type. Michael says he is good, so he is the latter.

I wish my boy could stay three for at least three years, but I know it will too soon pass.

I’ll try not to think about it.

—Daniel Nichols

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9 Responses

Yes, three is a great age. I remember a conversation with my wife that took place before we were married. She was describing the plot of The Tin Drum, including the fact that the narrator is, externally at least, a three-year-old, and, in passing, “everybody loves a three-year-old kid.” That meant nothing to me–I mean, at the time anything between roughly 2 and 7 was pretty much all the same to me. Later I understood.

I remember when we were making one of our many visits to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in DC where we lived with our two boys. My wife was pointing out to our son Thomas, who was somewhere between 2 and 3 years old, that this particular mosaic in one of the side chapels was a depiction of Jesus dying on the cross. He froze, looked up at her with a look of horror and said, “You mean God died?” BTW, Daniel, after a zillion older folks telling us that our sons would grow up so fast, at some point, I finally believed them. However, with two now out of college (one married) and one about to enter college, I still had no idea it would all go by as fast as it did. Enjoy! For us, we’re praying for grands!

Yes, William, and to make it worse, starting late I had already experienced it. I mean I had nieces and nephews and godchildren and friends’ children already grow up on me! That has given the whole thing a sort of bittersweet quality that young parents, like you and Mary, or for that matter my bride, cannot know.

Not fair, Janet. Dave didn’t say he disliked older children, only that he liked the toddler years the best. There is something so charming and sweet about very young children; how could one not find them endearing in ways that older children are not?

And speaking of Michael, the other day he was talking to his grandma on the phone. When he handed the phone back to me he said “She is so nice to me”. My mom heard this, laughed, and said “Tell him that I am nice to him because he is adorable”. I relayed this, and he became indignant: “I’m not a Dora Bull! I’m Michael!” I hastened to explain to him that this only meant that Grandma loved him to pieces. “To PIECES!?!” he said, acting thoroughly alarmed. I explained that this is just a figure of speech that meant that she loved him a lot. At this point he grinned and I realized that he was playing with us all along. Pretty sophisticated sense of humor…

I wasn’t trying to be unfair. I guess I just put it badly. They are absolutely adorable at three. In fact, I remember being pregnant with my second daughter when my oldest was three. I would look at her and think, “This is is great and I get to do this again in three years!” Unfortunately, three was probably my second daughter’s LEAST charming year. She is, however, unfailingly charming now.

I was just saying that if you look at it that way, the best part is over pretty fast, even if you have lots of kids.

We have had some really, really, awful oh-please-God-what-is-going-on-we-have-done-everything-that-you-asked-us-to-do-with-these-kids-and-our-whole-life-is-falling-apart kinds of years (Man, it is really hard to type with hyphens between all the words!), but there is always so much more to look forward to. At the moment, I am deriving endless pleasure from watching the way my son and his new wife relate to each other. It’s incredibly wonderful.

And then, of course, my oldest is supplying us with three year olds at a rapid pace.